These days there are channels on cable and satellite TV for just about anything—history, cooking, cartoons, music, dogs, cats, clowns, politics (not sure what made me think of those last two in sequence), and more.
So naturally there should be some videos available for our favorite development environment, right? After all, Visual Studio is certainly rich and deep enough to warrant several seasons of binge watching.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 03/22/20160 comments
If .NET were a country, Microsoft’s Scott Hunter would clearly be one of its senior statesmen. During his general session on Wednesday, March 9 at the Visual Studio Live! event in Las Vegas, Hunter gave an overview of the current state of .NET and the impact of having it now be open source.
He also ran through some the latest features and revisions to ASP.NET 5 and Visual Studio 2015 at his keynote address, appropriately entitled, What’s New in ASP.NET 5 and VS 2015. Hunter is the principal program manager lead for the ASP.NET team at Microsoft, and even he remains somewhat surprised at the new openness at Microsoft.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 03/15/20160 comments
Everyone learns a bit differently. As a ski instructor, I was always told people learn by doing, learn by watching, or learn by thinking—doers, watchers, and thinkers. And while everyone has a dominant learning style (I am most definitely a doer), everyone also is some combination of all three.
When you’re attending sessions at Visual Studio Live!, you hear presentations and see the demos. If you like what you see, but wish you could carry some of that along when you get back to your office and back to coding on your own, fear not. Several of the Visual Studio Live! presenters, with whom you’re undoubtedly familiar, also have several leading .NET books to their credit.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 03/04/20160 comments
We continue our series on the best Visual Studio blogs we’ve found to help you navigate the sea of available Microsoft resources. Thankfully, there is a small army of bloggers out there in the Visual Studio world looking things up and sharing their findings.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 02/22/20160 comments
Angular has gained quite a bit of popularity as an open-source Web application development framework due to its intent to simplify application development and testing.
Given its flexible nature, there are a number of approaches and best practices for incorporating Angular into your apps. Whether you're a dabbling novice or a proficient expert, here are four content-packed, super-informative AngularJS blogs we found that are worth a read.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 02/10/20160 comments
Visual Studio is such a powerhouse application development platform, that there's NO shortage of expert advice available in the blogosphere these days.
To help you navigate the resource waters, we dove head-first into this information ocean to find the best Visual Studio blogs for advice and guidance. Here’s part 1 of our findings, focused on ALM, TFS and VSTS.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 02/03/20160 comments
As 2015 comes to a close, it's been a great year in the Microsoft ecosystem when it comes to tools and technologies. Yet as a development team member, it can feel overwhelming when you have to keep up with all of that. As my fellow Visual Studio Live! conference co-chairs Andrew Brust and Rockford Lhotka and I started planning for the 2016 shows, we worked hard to make sure we had the right mix of cutting-edge tech, best practices, and topics you really need to know. As we did our advance planning, we left some openings in the Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas (March 7 – 11 at Bally's Hotel & Casino) agenda that we could fill later, so we could make sure we were prepared for the latest innovations coming from Microsoft and others in the industry.
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Posted by Brian Randell on 12/15/20150 comments
With so many new technologies and toolsets coming to the forefront, universal apps, collaboration, mobile apps -- you've got to stay on your toes just to keep up in the development world. There's increasing emphasis on "softer" skills like intuitive app design and drafting precision DevOps processes, as well as continued top-notch development with some of the newer tools and technologies like NoSQL, AngularJS and Roslyn. Whew -- that's a lot!
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Posted by Lafe Low on 11/05/20150 comments
As 2015 moves into our collective rearview mirror, this feels like a good to time to take stock of all the Visual Studio Live! goodness that has happened in the last 10 months.
Las Vegas, March 16–20
Our first event of the year, Las Vegas, always attracts a lively crowd, because, you know, it's Vegas. Oh, and St. Patrick's Day. But the attendees got their fill of learning, too, as the keynotes were hard-hitting, from John Montgomery's and Kieran Mockford's Visual Studio 2015 preview to the sharp-witted, eye-opening address from Billy Hollis.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 10/29/20150 comments
Ted Neward is one of the most popular speakers on the Visual Studio Live! circuit. You can usually find him, when not speaking, holding court with several attendees talking coding languages or recounting his latest adventures behind a barbeque grill.
We recently caught up with Neward, who's also The Working Programmer columnist for MSDN Magazine, and had a chance to find out what makes him tick.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 07/21/20150 comments